Spies in Arabia 1

Spies in Arabia The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East priya satia 1 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Satia, Priya. Spies in Arabia : the Great War and the cultural foundations of Britain’s covert empire in the Middle East / by Priya Satia. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-533141-7 1. Middle East—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 2. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Middle East. 3. Espionage—Great Britain. 4. Espionage—Middle East. 5. World War, 1914–1918—Secret service—Great Britain. I. Title. DS63.2.G7S28 2008 940.4'86410956—dc22 2007028405 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Contents Note on Arabic Spellings, xiii Reference Map, 2 Introduction, 3 Part I: War and Hope 1. The Foundations of Covert Empire, 23 2. The Cultural World of the Edwardian Agent, 59 3. The Failure of Empiricism and How the Agents Addressed It, 99 4. Cunning in War, 137 5. Imperial Expiation, 165 Part II: Peace and Terror 6. Offi cial Conspiracy Theories and the Wagers of Genius, 201 7. Air Control, 239 8. Covert Empire, 263 9. Seeing Like a Democracy, 287 Conclusion, 329 Notes, 339 Selected Bibliography, 409 Index, 443 Introduction I wonder why Arabia is the best-looking land, however you see it. I suppose it is the name that does it. —T. E. Lawrence, 1916 These gentlemen have formed a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men . are not to be governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues die . .; as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and after which a new order and system of things commenced. —Edmund Burke, 1788 At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents fi rst began seriously to venture into the region they knew as “Arabia.” They were drawn there by two objectives: the desire to secure the land route to India and the hope of fi nding in a proverbially mystical and antique land the metaphysical certainty they no longer felt at home. These competing objects created a dilemma for them as agents: How were they to gather practical information and serve the British state in a region they were attracted to because of its legendary inscrutability and promise of escape from Britain? The agents’ grappling with this 3 4 introduction conundrum in the era of the Great War and the manifold consequences of the tactical and methodological choices they made form the subject of this book. This is a story about a state that could not see, that depended on equivocal agents groping blindly through a fog of cultural representations about the new region it sought to control and the unique epistemological and technological remedies they evolved to soothe their consciences and cure their blindness. Their work cast a long shadow over imperial statecraft and metropolitan culture in the twentieth century. How states see—or don’t see—is, in my view, a matter intricately bound up with cultural history; it may even be that all states are unseeing, or at least intensely myopic, without the benefi t of a cultural lens to bring into focus the otherwise elusive space and people they rule. In most instances, this is the lens that concentrates the illuminations of the Enlightenment into a shaft powerful enough to strip a place of all idiosyncrasy and opacity, rendering it universally intelligible, empirically graspable. There are other places, however, in which the modern state’s knowledge-gathering practices are refracted through different cultural lenses, places deemed beyond the domain of the universally acces- sible, rational, secular world—perhaps, in Edmund Burke’s terms above, those places beyond the equinoctial. Burke was writing about India in the era of the notorious trial of Governor-General Warren Hastings, but questioning the ways of the empire and the limits of universalism was again the fashion on the eve of the Great War, when the gaze of the British state had fallen intently upon the region known as the Middle East.1 The story of British intelligence- gathering in the Middle East reveals the extent to which cultural representations mattered in the epistemological strategies the British state employed there and the extent to which the varying standards of the empire’s “geographical morality” fl owed from epistemological principles. This is a story of a state so conscious of the particular illegibility of the terrain it sought to control that it forsook empiricism for intuition, with critical consequences for both Britain and the Middle East as the war and its violent aftermath unfolded in the region. I am interested in this book in piecing together the world of British intelligence in the Middle East. More importantly, however, I want to unpack the enduring fascination with Arabia as a spy-space which colored this British effort (and has perhaps even attracted readers to this book).2 My focus is on the formation and fallout of the cultural imagination that shaped agents’ approach and methods, rather than on the effi cacy of the information order as such— on thinking about intelligence and agents’ skills rather than on the agents’ actual abilities (a subject better left to intelligence experts).3 Nor is my purpose to hold British representations of Arab views up against the Arab reality but to introduction 5 demonstrate that the activities of the modern state are shaped by the cultural imagination.4 Indeed, given received wisdom about the power of European cultural representations of the Orient, the cultural formation of intelligence agents must lie at the heart of any effort to understand British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East. The cultural imagination mattered especially in a region conceived in its very essence as a space for the imagination. As it happens, the intelligence agents wandering in the Middle East were among those early-twentieth- century Britons questioning the reliability of sense perception at a time when what Weber famously called the “disenchantment of the world” had triggered an almost desperate interest in matters spiritual. These were not the obscure, anonymous intelligence workers of a later, more bureaucratic era, but social, political, and, in some cases, cultural elites emerging from a range of profes- sional backgrounds, from military to diplomatic to scholarly. As a community, they shared almost without exclusion an intense literary ambition—many were prolifi c—and social contact with the British cultural and political establish- ments. Their personal searches for spiritual and cultural redemption, coupled with their practical diffi culties in navigating desert topography, profoundly shaped their methods as agents, and their mixing with the worlds of letters and politics at home ensured that awareness of their work in the Middle East was diffuse. In a sense I am trying to bring the history of perceptions of the Orient together with the history of perception as such, for, the social world of Edwardian Britain ensured that imperial statecraft and metropolitan culture were mutu- ally infl uential. These agents’ most important methodological innovation was an intuitive intelligence epistemology modeled on their understanding of the “Arab mind.” Long immersion in the desert would, they thought, allow them to replicate the apparently intuitive knowledge-gathering and navigational practices of nomadic Arabs.5 The premium this modus operandi placed on “genius” guaranteed them an enormous infl uence over the planning and execution of the Middle East campaigns of the Great War and over the postwar administration of the British-controlled Middle East. In the infl uence of their tactical imagination and epistemological outlook, this book argues, lies the explanation for the grad- ual transformation of British intelligence-gathering in the region from the informal, even accidental, work of world-weary Edwardians to the paranoid pre- occupation of a brutal aerial surveillance regime after the war. If, as James Scott has recently urged, local knowledge can serve as an antidote to the imperialism of the modern state’s fl attening gaze, in this instance agents of the British state fetishized local knowledge as the foundation of a violent effort to render nomad terrain legible. Their story is a reminder that imperialism is a 6 introduction political relationship more than a perspective; intimacy does not make it go away.6 British intelligence in the Middle East was, in short, different from British intelligence projects in other parts of the world in this period.

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